The cognitive dissonance, it burns!

"...To my knowledge there has not been any citizen who has registered a complaint. It has proved meritorious because we have collected significant information on bad guys, but only on bad guys, over the years."

Uh, yeah, so no citizen has registered a complaint because this program has been top secret. No citizen confirmed that it was occurring (until the anonymous hero who leaked the order did so).

And the program has, by all accounts, collected information on every single cell phone call made through the Verizon Wireless network (and there's no reason to believe that they were the only carrier targeted) since 1996. So I'm guessing we're all "bad guys" in Mr. Chambless's eyes now?

To be fair, this was a joint impromptu press conference with the enemy of freedom and Senator from Hollywood Diane Feinstein, so this isn't a Republican/Democrat issue, this is an evil evil legislators issue.

I just fired off an email to Sen. Chambliss (through his horrid webform filter)
with the subject line reading, "I want to register a complaint" and the body
stating how much I didn't like living in a country where I could be spied on by
my government with no probable cause and specifically how I thought it wasn't
right for the government to collect the metadata generated by my cell phone
calls.

... So a single order issued to Verizon Business Solutions in April covered metadata for every phone call made by every customer. Thats from one order out of what will probably be about 200 reported in next years numbers.

I agree with the rude pundit. This has probably been legal since 1979 and Smith v. Maryland. In any case, the horse is out of the barn,
and while it's nice that people are finally noticing and making a stink about it, does anyone think
Rand Paul's Fourth Amendment Restoration Act will pass?

Like the cops collecting DNA evidence from anyone who's arrested, as far as I can tell, the only
defense is keeping your head down so you don't cause anyone to look at you more closely. Not all
that different from living behind the iron curtain, really.